First it was their web sites failing to protect privacy, and now it’s their apps. Cory Bennett reports: Over half of presidential campaign-related smartphone apps on Android devices are exposing users’ sensitive data, according to new research. Presidential campaigns — and the groups that support them — are increasingly using smartphone apps to try to…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
SWIFT Software Bug Exploited by Bangladesh Bank Hackers
Phil Muncaster reports: A bug in SWIFT banking software may have been exploited to allow hackers to make off with $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank in February, according to reports. Investigators at British defense contractor BAE Systems told Reuters that the malware in question, evtdiag.exe, had been designed to change code in SWIFT’s Access…
Structuring a Settlement After Asserting Class Members Did Not Suffer Any Concrete Injury
R. Locke Beatty of McGuireWoods writes: Frequently, a class action complaint will set forth an elaborate theory of why the defendant’s actions were negligent or wrongful, but fall short when trying to identify how that conduct has harmed the class members. This kind of complaint invites a motion to dismiss on the grounds that the…
The Injuries Reilly Ignored: Consumer Data Breaches and Injury-in-Fact
Law student Shannon Grammel writes: The U.S. Supreme Court denied review in 2012 to thousands of individuals whose data was breached who were alleging increased harm of identity theft and seeking to reverse the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit’s decision to deny them standing in Reilly v. Ceridian Corp.1 In so doing, the Supreme…
SS7 hack explained: what can you do about it?
An episode on CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday evening probably alarmed a number of people as it demonstrated how hackers could remotely take over your cell phone and watch you through your camera without anything indicating to you that your camera was in operation, etc. Samuel Gibbs reports: Hackers can read text messages, listen to phone…
Schools put on high alert for JBoss ransomware exploit
Katherine Noyes reports: More than 2,000 machines at schools and other organizations have been infected with a backdoor in unpatched versions of JBoss that could be used at any moment to install ransomware such as Samsam. That’s according to Cisco’s Talos threat-intelligence organization, which on Friday announced that roughly 3.2 million machines worldwide are at risk. Many of those…